Direct Travel has added new features and capabilities to its Avenir technology platform, including guest travel management, consolidated reporting and expanded AI capabilities, the travel management company announced.
The new release of Avenir includes an integration with guest travel and expense platform Juno, which announced a partnership with Direct Travel last year. The company said connecting guest travel with managed travel provides better visibility to total travel activity for companies, and Direct Travel CEO Christal Bemont said that "the work [Juno] has done is being really well received by our joint customers."
She added that guest travel management has been in high demand from clients, who are facing "an arms race for talent" and "need to make sure that the very first experience [guests] have is a reflection of the company that you're going to go work for."
The Juno integration is a step toward an "expanding ecosystem of connected capabilities" that Direct Travel is providing. The TMC also recently announced a partnership with Emburse to provide a continuous data flow between Emburse and Avenir.
The update also provides a single destination for reporting, travel resources and program insights, the company said. With its data foundation, travel managers can build reports and analyze data with natural language.
Bemont said Direct Travel did a side-by-side comparison with other data tools on a complex question, asking to identify the two or three most critical areas for savings opportunities in a travel program. She said one tool was not able to compute the question, while another came back with results easily available via Google, but Avenir came up with "specific line-item examples of things where there were opportunities for savings based on patterns of where people traveled, negotiated rates and other kinds of insights."
The reporting capabilities were developed, Bemont said, with the idea that static reports were going to be less capable of providing insights as revenue management and distribution from suppliers get more complex.
"As suppliers offer more dynamic pricing and new ancillaries, and they have offer and order to start personalizing, the things that travel managers have looked at in the past, to have patterns around, there are going to be more and more questions," she said. "It's going to need to contemplate lots of different data sources."
Direct Travel also said that Avenir is combining its own AI with Spotnana's new multi-agent AI architecture, announced in recent weeks, to expand AI capabilities. Avenir will be able to deliver those capabilities alongside automated workflows for simplified servicing, and users can interface through the platform with natural language or through AI assistants, including Otto—with which Direct Travel is piloting a project with a handful of customers, Bemont said.
Beyond the Avenir updates, Bemont said Direct Travel currently is focusing on "bringing up the level of expectation" on service from the TMC.
"As time goes on, more and more will be automated and predicted and handled by technology, but when you do need someone, everyone should be treated like a VIP," Bemont said. "The idea that there are a handful of people inside of an organization that are VIP, what does it mean to treat someone like a VIP? Shouldn't that just be the basic principles for how you serve people?"